14 DAY TRIAL // During the Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) event for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) that took place early this week, between May 5 and 7, on the UbuntuOnAir channel, the Ubuntu developers discussed the possibility of switching to the GCC 5 compiler by default.
At the moment, Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet), the latest stable release of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, comes with GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 4.9.2, so the decision to switch to GCC 5.0 as the default compiler was taken because the system must be prepared for the next LTS (Long Term Support) version of Ubuntu.
"The next Ubuntu LTS release (16.04 LTS) will use GCC 5 as the standard compiler (and likely GCC 6 as the standard for go). We do not want to change the default compiler during the six months leading to the LTS, so we will make the switch to GCC 5 for 15.10" was stated in the description of the respective UOS session.
The Ubuntu developers will have to put a lot of effort into this, as it appears that over 350 build failures must be fixed before switching to GCC 5.0, which features a new libstdc++ ABI that makes things even more difficult. In similar news, it was discussed that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS would come with Python 3 by default.
